


Statement of Michael Shelley, regarding his House.

by CuttlefishKitch



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bones Breaking, Canon typical Spiral Weirdness, Gore, Gorey descriptions of unreality, House Body Comparisons, Identity Weirdness, Micael Survives, Michael was a house and then wasn't a house and got kinda fucked up about it, OH ALSO WARNING FOR, Statement Fic, UnSpiraled!Micael, aka The Distortion Eats People, and all that, and some general bone weirdness, cause "all the bones were in his hands", fear feeding, i'm so bad at tagging things, okay i THINK that's all the warnings, warnings for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23932210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CuttlefishKitch/pseuds/CuttlefishKitch
Summary: It hurts to be like this. It is agony to have been a house and to be one no longer. To be cored out and stuffed back into a sack of flesh and bone where once you stood proud and wooden and impossible. My stomach is just a stomach, and my heart is not a room.Or, Michael ruminates on his own fractured existences.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 92





	Statement of Michael Shelley, regarding his House.

**Author's Note:**

> For a little extra context I headcanon Michael Shelley as having Marfan's Syndrome.

**_Statement of Michael Shelley regarding his House. Original statement given August 17th, 2017._ **

I didn’t want to give this in person to any of you, considering it was one of your Archivists that did this to me. But I feel — Compelled? Obligated? _Nostalgic_ enough? — to have to put it down somewhere. Perhaps laying this all out on your tear-tainted paper that I once spent so long categorizing and filing and reading over will help me map out the ever-turning storm that is my thoughts. After all, if I can be mapped out once by your dead Archivist, then perhaps submitting part of myself to your archive will guide me through the maze inside my head. 

Somehow I doubt it. More likely I’ll just have another guest in my nightmares. Enjoy the spectacle, I suppose; it’s not like a stray Watcher could make them any worse.

I actually managed to dig up and read over the statement of Helen Richardson from before she... Replaced me. And it’s silly, sort of quaint almost, to see her descriptions of the hallways as if they were the deepest depths of our shared, ever-spiraling hellscape. Why she hadn’t even encountered a window before she briefly escaped! I’d have dearly loved to see what she made of the non-things beyond our reflectionless glass. Those wonderful fake eyes that show you nothing, and look out upon even more that is not there and could not possibly be.

I remember once comparing my hallways to a stomach. While I will not say I was wrong to do so, as the point I made came across to the other Archivist and was understood well enough, for the purpose of this statement, I believe a more apt metaphor is arteries. Flowing passages between all corners of a house dispersing vital nutrients to its cellrooms, connecting everything, twisting and branching through the whole of what I once was. And, just like the arteries and veins of creatures of flesh, you can follow them back through the whole of the body. Follow them past muscle, organs, and bone, deeper and deeper until you reach the heart of the house. 

What is the heart of a house? Is it the kitchen where food is prepared and eaten with family; for some a place of love and comfort, others stress and horror? Is it the bedroom where occupants are laid out; vulnerable and unconscious, at the mercy of whatever the house might choose to do while their eyes are closed and minds wrapped up in dreams? Or could it be the living room; where people spend their time, well, _living_ , in every wonderful-terrible-confusing sense of the word? 

My heart was all of those things, and yet it was none of them. It was the center and the edges. The place for rest, activity, hunger, and sleep, and it is where finally, _finally,_ after weeks, days, hours, minutes, millennia, moments of walking, I sat down in a chair. It, of course, was not a chair, but neither was there any option other than to sit upon it. 

I sometimes wondered about that chair. Was it there because I needed somewhere to sit, or did my need to sit turn something that was not a chair into a place where I could rest? Is there a meaningful difference? Could there even _be_ meaning in a room that was all at once a kitchen, bedroom, hallway, living room, and all the other organs of a house that we haphazardly ascribe meanings and activities to based on their positions and our preference? Regardless, as soon as I sat upon the thing that might have been a chair, we tore each other to shreds. 

I rent my skin and upholstery, tore apart my viscera and stuffing, shattered the bones and wooden frame at the very cores of our being until there was nothing left but the sludge of the room and my body mingling and mixing, twisting and turning, molding and reforming into something else. Something that both was and wasn’t Micheal and his House. I was strong, but of course my House was stronger, and I didn’t have as much power over myself as I, perhaps, would have liked. I was shattered apart, torn and twisted until all I was oozed into and out of the very walls of my House. It splintered my bones into shards and pulled them all askew until all I _was_ was HANDS and I — 

Well, I became the House.

And to be a house, one _needs_ occupants.

A house uninhabited is lonely. Worse than that, it is _starving_ , it needs feet upon its carpet like we need water in our throats. To be vacant is to die, inch by excruciating inch as your bones become withered and your paint flakes away like so much dried and peeling skin. 

And so I ate.

I invited people into my Home as guests, though, of course. They would never leave, so I suppose that made them tenants. It is a strange experience to be both land and landlord to people that long to be anywhere but where they find themselves. 

I’m sure _Helen_ understands the feeling _now_. I wonder if she’ll someday understand this feeling as well. Perhaps, though I imagine she will be more careful with what residents she selects; after all, choosing a house for people can't be so terribly different than choosing people for a house. 

Was that why I chose her? Did the irony amuse me? I can’t fully remember, but does anyone remember their exact reasons for selecting a particular cut of meat from the butcher’s shop? I’m certain I had them but they didn’t stick in my head or cling to the cracks in the floorboards.

The regret did. It clung as surely to my skin as wallpaper, and no matter how much I tried to convince myself I was haunted to my core, I could not shake the bitter aftertaste of sadness that came with every meal. Because, even if I had become the House, it had also become me. 

A house is not a who. It has no face, or name, or soul. The very essence of a house is to be a container for those that fancy themselves who and not what. To become the House and to force it to become me was to insulate the walls with my flesh, to violate the sanctity of the distinction between place and person, to mash together _who_ and _what_ in a way that is agony and nothing else.

To be a house with a human name is to be a rotten thing, a monster among monsters. Worse still is to remember what you were before as both your disparate parts and to know that your existence as them was right. It hurts to remember what it feels like to be right and to be made so very, _very wrong_. I did not want to be what I was, so I tried, desperately, to convince the people and places I inhabited that I wasn’t. To distort was my nature, so of course it would make sense even that would be passed through the filters of plentiful perception and undone until it could be less uncomfortable.

It still hurt though, and it hasn’t stopped hurting. Not even after Helen scraped me from the walls, split bone from wood, and paid me the most grievous insult; locking the door to myself in my face. 

And then — just as painfully as I was made the House — I was unmade. 

Where I was once hollow the space inside was ripped out and replaced with cruel identity and viscera. I became real again just in time to feel every bone in my body snap out of my hands and back to where they were before finishing my grand quest from your dead Archivist. I ceased to be the House called Michael and became this.

It hurts to be like this. It is agony to have been a house and to be one no longer. To be cored out and stuffed back into a sack of flesh and bone where once you stood proud and wooden and impossible. My stomach is just a stomach, and my heart is not a room. It is a convulsing little lump of muscle that beats far too fast when I turn my thoughts towards its existence and I remember that, before I became a house, that was dangerous. 

My cane did not come back with me, though surely I must have brought it in. Did it get digested by the House, I wonder, or did I just forget it? Did the world forget me the same way I forgot my cane? If I were to leave and walk down three blocks and over two would the little pharmacy still have my prescriptions? Would it still even be there?

The world turns endlessly, and so too does it hurtle through the vast expanse on an infinite spiral. Perhaps time is the grandest distortion of all, for what is a moment when it is stretched out and wound around a single, mind-numbing task but a shifted version of that same moment rushing by as it spins out of your control and steals years from right between your fingers? I cannot remember the exact year I stepped into my door. I believe it was in possession of two zeros, but of even that I cannot be sure. There has been anywhere from half to nearly a whole decade between when I first crossed that vicious threshold, and when I left it for the final, split-being time.

I do not know what to make of that, or of anything really. At least when I was the House I could be sure of my hunger, but now my stomach churns when I am starving and aches when it is full. My eyes trace patterns that do not exist but feel like Home, and the rapid beating of my harried heart feels like a familiar time-bomb in my chest. I have been told my fingers are long, but they seem impossibly short, the world all at once far too big and far too small for someone who was once a house. I long for nothing more than to burn away all that I am now. If only that would free me from this terrible, rotting _loneliness,_ for I no longer know who I am when I look in the mirror because now I can look in the mirror and _see_ the stranger looking back. Perhaps I would be better served shattering the glass and leaving myself at the mercy of the dark. But that of course would be too good for what I am now. No. Instead, I feel I am chased endlessly by questions as though I were the answers upon which they long to prey, and at the same time strung along by that same damnable desire over which I have no control.

Above all else, I want to know _why._ Why spit me back out like a chewed-up bone, sucked dry of all its marrow and magnificence? Why not kill me? Why relinquish me back into the clutches of It Knows Me? Because, without the protective walls and locks of my House, I am once again ensnared by its putrid gazing tendrils. Ink is a filthy thing, a stain that cannot be scrubbed away because even if I do not feel like Michael Shelley, it is his name that binds me to this place forever. 

Unless there is another way to be rid of that ceaseless gaze. A man I once deigned to call a friend found an escape, though his liberated truancy did not last long. Perhaps there isn’t a true escape, and once one of Them snakes its way around you, you are forever marked. Doomed eternally to be passed around and around and around from one Horror to the next until you are consumed by the last thing to set you in its jaws. 

There is no exit from this life, not truly. Even death submits you to It That Waits For All. Even if you can pry the doors within the maze open, the way out is locked for good.


End file.
